Pterosaur footprints show they landed just like birds

PTEROSAURS may have been furry rather than feathery, but perhaps they weren’t so very different from birds in other respects. A set of footprints newly unearthed in France is the first to show one of the winged reptiles coming in to land, and it suggests they did so in much the same way as modern birds.

While dinosaurs wandered the Mesozoic lands, their relatives the pterosaurs took to the skies. The flying reptiles remain something of a puzzle, and some palaeontologists even question whether the largest pterosaurs could fly at all. Now an exceptional set of footprints preserved in …